Dial in your diet: When you’re on a diet that is too low in Calories you will find it hard to fall asleep because you’re hungry.

Meditation: If you have a lot of stress and anxiety despite working hard daily, practice meditation for 15-30 minutes everyday to calm your mind.

Human touch: If you don’t have a partner to sleep with, you lack human touch and that results in a lot of stress and anxiety. To compensate for this, get a massage 2 times per week.

Blue light: Blue light from your laptop and smart phone trick your mind into thinking it’s day-time. When you’re exposed to a lot of blue light at night, it’s hard to fall asleep. As a result, you want to limit the use of electronics at night and use an app such as flux at night to change the colors of your screen.

So, how do you know if all of this is actually working?

You want to wake up feeling rested without the need for an alarm.

The definition of good sleep is that you wake up WITHOUT an alarm and feel rested.

The only purpose of an alarm is to wake you up before you’re ready to wake up.

The steps above are enough for most of you to optimise your sleep..

However, if you follow the advice in this post and you still wake up to an alarm feeling sleepy, there are 2 potential reasons:

You have sleep apnea: Sleep apnea means that you have pauses in breathing during sleep and the main symptom is snoring. A very large percentage of the population has sleep apnea, therefore it’s worth it to get a sleeping app for your phone and check for sleep apnea. If you have sleep apnea, you can go to a doctor and order a full sleep test to dial in your sleep 100%.

You need more sleep: In case you don’t have sleep apnea and you’ve done all of the above, try increasing to 10-12 hours of sleep per day and see if that helps. Some people NEED more sleep than others and you may be one of them.

Finally, I want to point out that roughly 5% of the population can sleep ~6 hours per night without any negative effect because of a rare genetic mutation.

Most people try to be the 5%, but the truth is that your sleep needs are determined by your genetics.